Healthcare environments, such as hospitals or clinics, include information systems, such as hospital information systems (HIS), radiology information systems (RIS), clinical information systems (CIS), and cardiovascular information systems (CVIS), and storage systems, such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), library information systems (LIS), and electronic medical records (EMR). Information stored may include patient medical histories, imaging data, test results, diagnosis information, management information, and/or scheduling information, for example. The information may be centrally stored or divided at a plurality of locations. Healthcare practitioners may desire to access patient information or other information at various points in a healthcare workflow. For example, during and/or after surgery, medical personnel may access patient information, such as images of a patient's anatomy, that are stored in a medical information system. Radiologists, cardiologists and/or other clinicians may review stored images and/or other information, for example.
Using a PACS and/or other workstation, a clinician, such as a radiologist or cardiologist, for example, may perform a variety of activities, such as an image reading, to facilitate a clinical workflow. A reading, such as a radiology or cardiology procedure reading, is a process of a healthcare practitioner, such as a radiologist or a cardiologist, viewing digital images of a patient. The practitioner performs a diagnosis based on a content of the diagnostic images and reports on results electronically (e.g., using dictation or otherwise) or on paper. The practitioner, such as a radiologist or cardiologist, typically uses other tools to perform diagnosis. Some examples of other tools are prior and related prior (historical) exams and their results, laboratory exams (such as blood work), allergies, pathology results, medication, alerts, document images, and other tools. For example, a radiologist or cardiologist typically looks into other systems such as laboratory information, electronic medical records, and healthcare information when reading examination results.
Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death in the western world, which can contribute to increasing personal, community and health care costs. Modern imaging techniques, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Commuted Tomography (CT), for example, have been recognized as enabling assessment of the presence and extent of cardiovascular disease. However, the amount of image data involved in a comprehensive patient study can be massive. For example, gated cardiac MRI or CT sequences recorded from a complete cardiac cycle can include 1500-5000 two dimensional (2D) images, which can pose challenges to archiving, storage and data transfer.
Four-dimensional (4D) imaging and five-dimensional (5D) imaging, which is 4D data acquired at different time points, such as 4D and 5D MRI, for example, can play an important role in understanding the mechanisms involved in the progression of cardiovascular disease. However, 4D and 5D imaging pose challenges to human perception, which is more accustomed to 2D images. Moreover, manual analysis of 4D and/or 5D images can be subjective and can compromise the accuracy and reproducibility of quantitative measurements. Some known methods for analyzing 4D and/or 5D images require human interactions, and others are not suitable for use in a clinical environment due to other limitations.
Also, alignment and navigation of inter-modality and/or intra-modality images can be challenging because images are captured in various orientations and positions and at different scales. Even for an expert, it can be a time consuming process to manually align data. Further, different gating methods currently used in the clinical environment, coupled with noise and error, can make it difficult to manually align data. For example, peripheral-gated images can be delayed with respect to precordial-gated images. Also, gating information is not always provided when images are made available for inspection, for example, on a PACS. Also, different temporal resolutions (number of frames) can be used for different modalities and different diseases, making image alignment and navigation difficult.